This is my Spotlight Session from the 34th Distance Teaching & Learning Conference, at Wisconsin Madison, August 8th, 2018. Appropriately enough, I did this online and at a distance thanks to my ineptitude at dealing with the bureaucracy of immigration. Unfortunately my audio died as we moved to the Q&A session so, if anyone who was there (or anyone else) has any questions or observations, do please post them here! Comments are moderated.

The talk was concerned with how online learning is fundamentally different from in-person learning, and what that means for how (or even whether) we teach, in the traditional formal sense of the word.

Teaching is always a gestalt process, an emergent consequence of the actions of many teachers, including most notably the learners themselves, which is always greater than (and notably different from) the sum of its parts. This deeply distributed process is often masked by the inevitable (thanks to physics in traditional classrooms) dominance of an individual teacher in the process. Online, the mask falls off. Learners invariably have both far greater control and far more connection with the distributed gestalt. This is great, unless institutional teachers fight against it with rewards and punishments, in a pointless and counter-productive effort to try to sustain the level of control that is almost effortlessly attained by traditional in-person teachers, and that is purely a consequence of solving problems caused by physical classroom needs, not of the needs of learners. I describe some of the ways that we deal with the inherent weaknesses of in-person teaching especially relating to autonomy and competence support, and observe how such pedagogical methods are a solution to problems caused by the contingent side effects of in person teaching, not to learning in general.

The talk concludes with some broad characterization of what is different when teachers choose to let go of that control. I observe that what might have been Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest creation was his effective learning process, without which none of the rest of his creations could have happened. I am hopeful that now, thanks to the connected world that we live in, we can all learn like Leonardo, if and only if teachers can learn to let go.

An article for Aeon by Jon Tennant on the heinous state of affairs that gives unscrupulous publishers profit margins that put Apple to shame while hiding publicly funded research from the public that pays for it. It is a shamefully broken system that stands in the way of human progress. It has to change.

The ground this (open access) article goes over is much the same as the ground many of us have been tilling for many years, but it’s well expressed, and good to see it aired in a non-academic (though intellectually vigorous) journal like Aeon. It winds up with a set of six recommendations for things that all academics can do to improve our lot, which all make sense to me:

Sign, and commit to, the Declaration on Research Assessment, and demand fairer evaluation criteria independent of journal brands. This will reduce dependencies on commercial journals and their negative impact on research.

Demand openness. Even in research fields such as global health, 60 per cent of researchers do not archive their research so it is publicly available, even when it is completely free and within journal policies to do so. We should demand accountability for openness to liberate this life-saving knowledge.

Know your rights. Researchers can use the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Rights Coalition (SPARC) Author Addendum to retain rights to their research, instead of blindly giving it away to publishers. Regain control.

Support libraries. Current library subscription contracts are protected from public view by ‘non-disclosure clauses’ that act to prevent any price transparency in a profoundly anti-competitive practice that creates market dysfunction. We should support libraries in renegotiating such contracts, and in some cases even provide support in cancelling them, so that they can reinvest funds in more sustainable publishing ventures.

Help to build something better. On average, academics currently spend around $5,000 for each published article – to get a PDF and some extra sides. A range of different studies and working examples exist that show the true cost of publishing an article can be as low as $100 using cost-efficient funding schemes, community buy-in, and technologies that go a step further than PDF generation. We can do better.

Use your imagination. What would you want the scholarly communication system to look like? What are all the wonderful features you would include? What can you do to help turn a vision into reality?

Sadly published behind a paywall (but, happily, also available at SciHub) this is a fascinating sequence of studies from Hafenbrack & Voh that, firstly, appears to demonstrate that mindfulness (meditative practice) actively reduces motivation to perform a wide range of cognitively taxing or repetitive tasks, then shows that (despite this, and contrary to what might be expected) the loss of motivation has little or no effect on performance. The studies seem well-designed and well integrated, involving a very wide range of participants across continents, a wide variety of activities, and lots of good meta-analysis to pull them together. I’ll talk about why there are none-the-less very good reasons to be cautious in wholeheartedly accepting the results later on but, even with my provisos, the fact that such an effect can be seen at all is really interesting. Hafenbrack & Voh hypothesize (and provide evidence) that, because mindfulness tends to result in improvements in many other areas of cognition and performance, the overall effect is more or less neutral on actual task performance. The researchers partly explain this by citing other studies showing meditation-mediated improvements in empathy, reading comprehension, resilience to unpleasant images, resistance to distraction, negotiation effectiveness, and improved health indicators, though they only attempt to find out about reduced levels of distraction in their own experiments. They conclude that the effects of mindfulness on performance are complex and nuanced, and that employers and organizers of meditation/mindfulness sessions should therefore look carefully into their timing in the context of the working day.

What I find especially interesting about this study are the suggested reasons that mindfulness might impair motivation, which provided the initial justification for the research:

mindfulness tends to focus on valuing the ‘now’ rather than dwelling on the future.

mindfulness aims to reduce arousal (though, interestingly, many forms of it used in the Western mainstream actually seem to stoke the ego).

I’m not totally convinced by (1), inasmuch as it seems to me that the researchers believe that motivation is about desiring (or wishing to avoid) a future state, which is only partly true, notably in the case of simple extrinsic motivation (especially when externally regulated, as in these studies). It is far less likely to be true in the case of intrinsic motivation. Indeed, high levels of intrinsic motivation tend to be very focused on the ‘now’ and, in many cases, can result in a state of flow that can be very closely akin to mindfulness. For me, for instance, playing music can (sometimes) be a highly meditative pursuit with very little future focus. The same can (sometimes) be true when I get into the flow of most things, from writing to sailing to playing with my grandson. It can even be true for at least a couple of the tasks the researchers used to test their theory, when actively chosen by people as fun things to do rather than given to them as part of a research study.

That mindfulness may reduce arousal, and so in turn reduce motivation, is more believable though, again, it depends very much upon context whether that affects task performance positively or negatively. Sticking with a music theme, some pieces require intense concentration, physical effort, and mental agility, especially when learning a technically demanding new piece so, though it is usually bad to be tense when attempting such things, excessive relaxation might not be too great either. However, other kinds of music require you only to be at one with the sound and the instrument, and being in a relaxed mental state is really good for that. It is not a coincidence that many religious rituals involve music-making – especially that involving repetitive rhythmic sounds, chants, and drones – because it can lift you to exactly that detached, calm, yet spiritually heightened state of mindfulness. I find that the most fun and rewarding musical activities tend to be those which combine both modes at once – things like counterpoint or blues, in which the patterns are relatively easy to learn but remain infinitely rich in their expression. This hints that the real world of motivation, and other mental states, is way more complex than experiments like this suggest. I use music as a fairly unequivocal example, but similar diversity lies even in mundane bureaucratic form-filling, and certainly in complex creative behaviours like teaching or research.

Methodological concerns

One central problem with both hypotheses on reasons for reduced motivation, and with the researchers’ discussion and conclusions, is that they mistakenly assume motivation to be one thing – a very behaviourist orientation that looks at simple effects and ignores their complex causes – when, in reality, it is many things, often all at once, and the kind and strength of motivation varies enormously from one context to the next, often on a minute-by-minute basis, typically changing as a direct result of performance on a given task as well as other extrinsic factors. This study almost completely conceals such diversity.

Another problem is that the seemingly innocuous term ‘participants’ subtly and all too easily shifts from its actual meaning (the averaged behaviours of a particular group of people) to ‘all people’ in the description of the resultsm,the discussion, and the conclusion. It’s like saying ‘ripe bananas are yellow’ because (on average) if you examine any given square centimetre of a ripe banana in a batch, the chances are that it will mostly be yellow. This is despite the fact that virtually no bananas are wholly yellow, some are mainly red, a lot are partly green, and many are mainly black or brown. It bothers me that the consequent leap from ‘on average, people tend to be less motivated to perform researcher-imposed tasks after meditation’ to ‘meditation impairs task motivation’ is huge and unwarranted, especially in the absence of a truly plausible (or at least generalizable) model of why this might be so. In fairness, this is exactly the same form of flawed inductive thinking used in the vast majority of experimental studies in education, sociology, psychology, and related disciplines the world over. Knowing average tendencies can be extremely useful in all sorts of ways but to slip from ‘on average, X’ to ‘X’ as this and countless other studies do, is dangerous and counter-productive, especially when combined with a slip from ‘is’ to ‘ought’, when suggesting ways the research can be applied. This kind of experimental study is equally bad at discovering reasons for those averages because (unlike less fuzzy pseudo sciences) the range of possible inputs and outputs is vast, and highly interconnected: there’s irreversible complexity in the whole thing. Such studies can be at least partly saved by including rich qualitative information and analysis, but there’s none of that here. Smedlund offers a far subtler and more thorough critique of this kind of psychological experiment that I highly recommend anyone engaged in such studies should read.

Another way of interpreting the results

I like this paper and, for all my concerns, have found much that is thought-provoking within it. However, the simplistic implied behaviourist model of motivation and the lack of qualitative information that would help to better interpret the results does raise more questions than it answers. It also strikes me that, rather than drawing conclusions about ways to change the behaviour of people in organizations, it would make far more sense and have far more lasting value to look at ways to change the tasks expected of them so that they are (ideally) better aligned with intrinsic motivation, or (where that is difficult or impossible) are less externally regulated. Assuming at least a glimmer of truth in these findings (and there is more than a glimmer) I would hypothesize that, under such circumstances, mindfulness would be highly beneficial. Like so many things relating to human activity, it ain’t what you do it’s the way (and the where, and the when, and the why) that you do it that matters most.

The BBC’s Shipping Forecast is one of the great binding traditions of British culture that has been many a Brit’s lullaby since time immemorial (ie. long before I was born). Though I never once paid attention to its content in all the decades I heard it, eleven years after leaving the country I could still probably recite the majority of the 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles from memory.

For as long as I can recall, the gently soothing voice of the Shipping Forecast was Peter Jefferson (apparently he retired after 40 years in 2009) who, in this magnificently somnolent rendering, immortalizes exerpts from the General Data Protection Regulation that has recently come into force in the EU. My eyelids start drooping about 30 seconds in.

TBL is rightfully indignant and concerned about the fact that “what was once a rich selection of blogs and websites has been compressed under the powerful weight of a few dominant platforms.” The Web, according to Berners-Lee, is at great risk of degenerating into a few big versions of Compuserve or AOL sucking up most of the bandwidth of the Internet, and most of the attention of its inhabitants. In an open letter, he outlines the dangers of putting so much power into hands that either see it as a burden, or who actively exploit it for evil.

I really really hate Facebook more than most, because it aggressively seeks to destroy all that is good about the Web, and it is ruthlessly efficient at doing so, regardless of the human costs. Yes, let’s kill that in any way that we can, because it is actually and actively evil, and shows no sign of getting any nicer. I am somewhat less concerned that Google gets 87% of all online searches (notwithstanding the very real dangers of a single set of algorithms shaping what we find), because most of Google’s goals are well aligned with those of the Web. The more openly people share and link, the better it gets, and the more money Google makes. It is very much in Google’s interest to support an open, highly distributed, highly connected Web, and the company is as keen as everyone else to avoid the dangers of falsehoods, bias, and the spread of hatred (which are among the very things that Facebook feeds upon), and, thanks to its strong market position and careful hiring practices, it is more capable of doing so than pretty much anyone else. Google rightly hates Facebook (and others of its ilk) not just because it is a competitor, but because it removes things from the open Web, probably spreads lies more easily than truths, and so reduces Google’s value.

I am somewhat bothered that the top 100 sites (according to WIkipedia, based on Alexa and SimilarWeb results) probably get far more traffic than the next few thousand put together, and that the long tail pretty much flattens to approximately zero after that. However, that’s an inevitable consequence of the design of the Web (it’s a scale-free network subject to power laws), and ‘approximately zero’ may actually translate to hundreds of thousands or even millions of people, so it’s not quite the skewed mess that it seems. It is, as TBL observes, very disturbing that big companies with big pockets purchase potential competitors and stifle innovation, and I agree that (like all monopolies) they should be regulated, but there’s no way they are ever going to get everything or everyone, at least without the help of politicians and evil legislation, because it’s a really long tail.

It is also very interesting that even the top 10 – according to just about all the systems that measure such things – includes the unequivocally admirable and open Wikipedia itself, and also Reddit which, though now straying from its fully open model, remains excellently social and open. In different ways, both give more than they take.

It is also worth noting that there are many different ways to calculate rank. Moz.com (based on the Mozscape web index of 31 Billion domains and 165 Billion pages) has a very different view of things, for instance, in which Facebook doesn’t even make it to the domains listing, and is way below WordPress and several others in the popular pages list, which is a direct result of it being a closed and greedy system. Quantcast’s perspective is somewhat different again, albeit only focused on US sites which are a small but significant portion of the whole.

Most significantly, and to reiterate the point because it is worth making, the long tail is very long indeed. Regardless of the dangers of a handful of gigantic platforms casting their ugly shadows over the landscape, I am extremely heartened by the fact that, now, over 30% of all websites run on WordPress, which is both open source and very close to the distributed ideal that TBL espouses, allowing individuals and small communities to stake their claims, make a space, and link (profusely) with one another, without lock-in, central control, or inhibition of any kind. That 30% puts any one of the big monoliths, including Facebook, very far into the shade. And, though WordPress’s nearest competitor (Joomla, also open source) accounts for a ‘mere’ 3% of all websites, there are hundreds if not thousands of similar systems, not to mention a huge number of pages (50% of the total, according to W3Techs) that people still roll for themselves.

Yes, the greedy monoliths are extremely dangerous and should, where possible, be avoided, and it is certainly worth looking into ways of regulating their activities, nationally and internationally, as many governments are already doing and should continue to do so. We must ever be vigilant. But the Web continues to grow, and to diversify regardless of their pernicious influence because it is far bigger than all of them put together.

A perceptive article listing some of Facebook’s evils and suggesting an analogy between the tactics used by Big Tobacco and those used by the company. I think there are a few significant differences. Big Tobacco is not one company bent on profit no matter what the cost. Big tobacco largely stopped claiming it was doing good quite a long time ago. And Big Tobacco only kills and maims people’s bodies. Facebook is aiming for the soul. The rest is just collateral damage.

The end of Facebook couldn’t come soon enough, but we’ve been reading headlines not unlike this for around a decade, yet still its malignant tumour in the lungs of the Web grows, sucking the air out of all good things.

Despite losses in the youth market (not only in the UK), as the article notes, Facebook has deep pockets and is metastasizing at a frightening rate. Instagram and WhatsApp are only the most prominent recent growths, and no doubt far from the last. Also, the main tumour itself is still evolving, backed by development funding that staggers belief. It would take a lot to cure us of this awful thing. On the optimistic side, however, Metcalfe’s Law works just as well in reverse as going forward. Networks can grow exponentially, but they can shrink just as fast. Perhaps these small losses will be the start of a cascade. Let’s hope so.

At least in Ontario, it seems that there are about as many women as men taking STEM programs at undergraduate level. This represents a smaller percentage of women taking STEM subjects overall because there are way more women entering university in the first place. A more interesting reading of this, therefore, is not that we have a problem attracting women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but that we have a problem attracting men to the humanities, social sciences, and the liberal arts. As the article puts it:

“it’s not that women aren’t interested in STEM; it’s that men aren’t interested in poetry—or languages or philosophy or art or all the other non-STEM subjects.”

That’s a serious problem.

As someone with qualifications in both (incredibly broad) areas, and interests in many sub-areas of each, I find the arbitrary separation between them to be ludicrous, leading to no end of idiocy at both extremes, and little opportunity for cross-fertilization in the middle. It bothers me greatly that technology subjects like computing or architecture should be bundled with sciences like biology or physics, but not with social sciences or arts, which are way more relevant and appropriate to the activities of most computer professionals. In fact, it bothers me that we feel the need to separate out large fields like this at all. Everyone plays lip service to cross-disciplinary work but, when we try to take that seriously and cross the big boundaries, there is so much polarization between the science and arts communities that they usually don’t even understand one another, let alone work in harmony. We don’t just need more men in the liberal arts – we need more scientists, engineers, and technologists to cross those boundaries, whatever their gender. And, vice versa, we need more liberal artists (that sounds odd, but I have no better term) and social scientists in the sciences and, especially, in technology.

But it’s also a problem of category errors in the other direction. This clumping together of the whole of STEM conceals the fact that in some subjects – computing, say – there actually is a massive gender imbalance (including in Ontario), no matter how you mess with the statistics. This is what happens when you try to use averages to talk about specifics: it conceals far more than it reveals.

I wish I knew how to change that imbalance in my own designated field of computing, an area that I deliberately chose precisely because it cuts across almost every other field and did not limit me to doing one kind of thing. I do arts, science, social science, humanities, and more, thanks to working with machines that cross virtually every boundary.

I suspect that fixing the problem has little to do with marketing our programs better, nor with any such surface efforts that focus on the symptoms rather than the cause. A better solution is to accept and to celebrate the fact that the field of computing is much broader and vastly more interesting than the tiny subset of it that can be described as computer science, and to build up from there. It’s especially annoying that the problem exists at Athabasca where a wise decision was made long ago not to offer a computer science program. We have computing and information systems programs, but not any programs in computer science. Unfortunately, thanks to a combination of lazy media and computing profs (suffering from science envy) that promulgate the nonsense, even good friends of mine that should know better sometimes describe me as a computer scientist (I am emphatically not), and even some of our own staff think of what we do as computer science. To change that perception means not just a change in nomenclature, but a change in how and what we, at least in Athabasca, teach. For example, we might mindfully adopt an approach that contextualizes computing around projects and applications, rather than its theory and mechanics. We might design a program that doesn’t just lump together a bunch of disconnected courses and call it a minor but that, in each course (if courses are even needed), actively crosses boundaries – to see how code relates to poetry, how art can inform and be informed by software, how understanding how people behave can be used in designing better systems, how learning is changed by the tools we create, and so on.

We don’t need disciplines any more, especially not in a technology field. We need connections. We don’t need to change our image. We need to change our reality. I’m finding that to be quite a difficult challenge right now.

I love this art project – a forest that owns itself and that makes money on its own behalf, eventually with no human control or ownership. From the blurb…

“The Project emerged from research in the fields of crypto governance, smart contracts, economics and questions regarding representations of natural systems in the techno-sphere. It creates a framework whereby a forest is able to sell licences to log its own trees through automated processes, smart contracts and blockchain technology. “

But it gets better…

“The terra0 project creates a scenario whereby the forest, augmented through automated processes, utilitizes itself and thereby accumulates capital. A shift from valorisation through third parties to a self-utilization makes it possible for the forest to procure its real counter-value and eventually buy itself. The augmented forest is not only owner of itself, but is thus in the position to buy more ground and therefore to expand.”